Firefox Steps into 3D

New initiative will bring futuristic virtual reality effects to the web surfing experience.

Vladimir Vukićević, Mozilla's director of engineering, has announced an effort to integrate virtual reality (VR) technologies into the Firefox browser. According to Vukićević, Firefox developers will begin adding support for virtual reality devices, such as Oculus Rift, to experimental Firefox builds "so that Web developers can start experimenting with adding VR interactivity to their websites and content."Other changes will follow as the developers continue to prepare Firefox for a 3D future. Vukićević's blog post outlines the following goals for Firefox's VR initiative:

Mixing WebGL-rendered 3D content with DOM-rendered 3D-transformed content in a single 3D space.

Receiving input from orientation and position sensors, with a focus on reducing latency from input/render to final presentation.

Vukićević points out that the experimental VR version of Firefox is not currently in the main Firefox source tree. The immediate goal is to get feedback from developers and VR device vendors that will help set the direction and priorities for the work ahead. Ultimately, the team hopes to integrate VR functionality fully with mainstream Firefox versions.

Related content

Mozilla Foundation's Gecko used to be "the" choice for embedding a HTML renderer into any application. Having the very popular Firefox web browser as its main success case, the Gecko engine seems to provide quite efficient web content rendering times. However, what the KDE project started as their own web content rendering engine (KHTML and friends) was transformed by Apple into Webkit, the engine used in their Safari web browser.

Firefox OS has come out of nowhere to challenge Android and iOS in the mobile operating system market. We'll show you what is different about Firefox OS and compare a recent Firefox OS phone with a comparable Android device.